Just what the loyal ordered
It is usually not wise to play a sequel without playing the previous games, especially when plot events and characters are carried over. The ending of Halo 3 is just another driving level without Halo. I would not have understood Silent Hill 3 without having first played Silent Hill, not having done so would have rendered me blind and lost. This is what I expected from Ratchet and Clank Future; I have not played any of the previous four titles. All I knew them for were good reviews, good demos and thinly veiled phallic names (Size Matters, Ha!), and I expected to be punished for my lazy, elitist gaming habits. Thankfully Insomniac saw fit to make their second PS3 outing an excellent game in its own right, and instead of alienating me for having missed the PS2 Ratchet's it has sent me on a quest to find and add them all to my collection.
Right around the PS2 launch Sony promised Toy Story quality visuals rendered in real time. Like many things that Sony says, this never came true. It never really even came close. Flash forward to the PS3 and this long forgotten promise has finally been fulfilled. Ratchet and Clank Future is easily one of the best looking PS3 games to date. Its quality does not rest in excruciating (and usually fleeting) detail, but in the over all polish and look of the game. Ratchet's world is visually and audibly seamless. It has the look and feel of a Pixar film minus the talking cars and cooking rats. Add some sweet weapons and bolt collecting to Monsters, Inc., then swap Clank for the talking eyeball thing and this game is the beautiful, bastard child.
Ratchet and Clank Future also distills the previous games down into a single game that is solid from beginning to end. As the previous titles went on, wandering further from their platform roots and growing more complicated they decreased in quality. More did not always mean better. Like many multiple sequel games (Twisted Metal, Burnout, Gran Turismo, etc) Ratchet and Clank hit the sweet spot around two or three. Future leaves behind the death match heavy Deadlocked for the finely tuned platforming with big guns that were previously successful. Mario, if he were a member of some future NRA and had a tail, would be proud. The level design is solid, rewarding careful exploration without being tedious, and even unlocking more when returning with newly purchased weapons.
The more is not always better issue does crop up occasionally, and one major problem is indeed the sheer number of weapons. Not all of then are useful, and a few are drastically over powered, especially once they are leveled up. It would be quite tempting to blow through the entire game using the guided missiles, and that tactic would be successful right up to the first real boss encounter. Boss's force careful ammunition rationing and are difficult enough that having each weapon leveled up a few times helps a great deal. They are a welcome, if drastic, jump in difficulty to an otherwise easy game.
In the end the PS3 may have finally gotten what the average Heavenly Sword and unfortunate Lair failed to deliver: a solid, mass market, exclusive title. There is much untapped potential in the PS3, and only Insomniac has managed to coax it out thus far. It has become difficult to choose which future sequel to anticipate more: Resistance 2 (Even More Brown) or Ratchet and Clank Future (Here's Hoping for a Wii joke). My money's on the lombax.
